Desktop GPU power for your backpack.

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Nvidia is trying to bring mobile GPUs closer to desktop ones with every generation.
With 'Maxwell' they were able to be on par with a desktop GTX 980.

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With the 970M and 980M Nvidia presents the new high-end notebook GPUs just three weeks after their desktop versions.
Nvidia promises a huge performance increase in the mobile GPU segment
Although it must be said, you will need 2 GTX 970M to compete with one normal GTX 980, it is still a huge achievement by Nvidia to get so much horse power out of such a small package, in this case a 17-inch, 22,9mm thick notebook.

As the other Maxwell cards the mobile ones feature things like "DSR" and MFAA too. And of course all the othe GeForce specific features.
For you spec-heads:

Nvidia GTX 980:
Shaders: 2.048
Base Clock: 1.126 MHz
Boost Clock: 1.240 MHz
GFLOPs: 4.612 GFLOPs
TMUs: 128
Texelfillrate: 144.128 MTex/s
Memory: 4.096 MB GDDR5
Memory Clock: 3.506 MHz
Interface: 256 Bit
Bandwidth: 224.384 MB/s

Nvidia GTX 980M
Shaders: 1.536
Base Clock: 1.038 MHz
Boost Clock: Variable
GFLOPs: 3.188 GFLOPs
TMUs: 96
Texelfillrate: 99.648 MTex/s
Memory: 2,4,8 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock: 2.500 MHz
Interface: 256 Bit
Bandwidth: 160.000 MB/s

Nvidia GTX 970M
Shaders: 1.280
Base Clock: 924 MHz
Boost Clock: Variable
GFLOPs: 2.365 GFLOPs
TMUs: 80
Texelfillrate: 73.920 MTex/s
Memory: 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock: 2.500 MHz
Interface: 192 Bit
Bandwidth: 120.000 MB/s

The 980M has some similarities to the desktop version for example the memory interface which is on both cards 256 Bit and both chips are based on the GM204-GPU.
But the differences are: only 12 SMM-Units on the mobile GPU (10 SMM-Units on the 970M) instead of 16 on the desktop one. Instead of four GPCs-Units there are only three on the mobile one wich decreases the rasterizing performance. On the GTX 970M they even disabled one memory controller which decreases the Memory interface to only 192 Bit.

Of course you want to see how it performs in real life, here are some numbers for you:

Tomb Raider - 1.920 × 1.080 FXAA/16xAF:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M SLI: 99,5
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 (Max): 92,1
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti (Max): 82,5
AMD Radeon R9 290X (Max): 79,5
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970: 77,1
Nvidia GeForce GTX 770: 56,3
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M: 51,8

The benches were done on an Aourus X7 with an Intel I7 4870HQ with 3.5ghz by 'ComputerBase'.
As you can see above the 970M SLI does beat the 980 by 7% but a single 970M does only compare to a GTX 770. To the 970, the 970M is 49% behind.
On battery the 970M SLI gets downclocked and can only reach 64,2 FPS

On this pic below you can see the massive die size for a notebook which resembles a desktop GPU a lot.

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The whole system draws 220 watts under load and 147 with only one GPU enabled
This development lets you gather some hope for all those Ultra-small-form-factor builds and "Steam Boxes". (if you let the horrendous prices aside)
I think in 1-2 years we can see some very small Gaming boxes in the size of a Gigabyte Brix or Intel Nuc with similar performance compared to a mid-high end desktop PC.

Sadly I have no informations about heat, I only know that the notebook got really loud.

Source
 
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